Menu Pops Down While Typing!!!

I *thought* this was going to be a fix. But I keep ending up TPing to someone else's land, who I don't know. How embarrassing it that when yer AV is nekkie cuz they were... in a compromising position??? Then the menu dropping down and trying to upload things...

Is this what i pay each month for??? One PC that now overheats when I try to run the client (and that was after the option update and yes it's the ONLY time it has heating issues... before I could run 2 copies of SL on that particular machine and now I can't even run one. I've loaded everything under the sun on it even Poser and no issues period. Only with SL. Strange but true) and a now another PC with a client that seems to want to plaster my nekkid AV everywhere!

FFS, upgrade and stop with the downgrades! Some of the new things are cool, but maybe work on the things that are broken first. PLEASE!

Like missing inventory... that NEVER found it's way home after being gobbled up by SL that I used my US$ to buy L$ to purchase.

Thanks... maybe...

I have been CONSTANTLY triggering this bug since yesterday's update, because I'm constantly zooming and panning with alt and control, which seems to sometimes leave focus in the menus. I definitely teleported home while in the middle of talking with someone about a contract job. At this point, I went and saved a backup of my settings.xml, because I have no clue what random features in the debug menu I'm turning on or off.

We saw this bug in First Look, and we all assumed it was no big deal because the First Look client was a beta. How'd this reach the main client?

Just for completeness:
Have you loaded up a Six Flags Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 map? (that one used up 1.5 GB of swap file on my laptop)
Have you tried Dwarf Fortress? (takes a while, but eventually the game slows down due to the number of units and it uses 98% of my CPU)

;P

This might have been in the beta grid as well. But I have not been doing my job and living there. sorry.

actually this is a new feature. Just tap the ALT then look up at the File, Edit... This was started some where in the release notes. it is to all you the ability to hit one key then the other. and not have to hold down ALT. but I'm finding this is getting in the way now. So if you are to quick with the ALT you just might find yourself in another world.

Perhaps some key other than Alt should be used to activate the menu. F10 is supposedly a standard keystroke to activate an application's menu, according to Microsoft. Maybe it should require pressing both alt keys down simultaneously.

*Tests F10*
Yup, highlighted my File menu alright.

SO what to do with the Mac?

It may be intended as a feature, but it's definitely buggy as it's implemented now. As far as I can tell, the menu should only open if I tap alt, not if I hold down alt and click on something and then also hold down control to pan around.

Anyone with a high hacker-cred rating want to take a shot at "disabling" this feature with a hex-editor? Strife?

I was visiting the forums for something else but caught this thread. This is driving me nuts! I was testing something for a friend the other day with mouse look and kept getting sent home, it actually took me about 4 minutes to figure out wtf happened lol... I do NOT like this implementation of it and it DOES need to be reworked.

Related talk here:

/327/fa/161397/1.html

I've popped up Help Request plenty of times before accidentally, but this time I actually said something it.



:P

It turns out that there's a hidden setting to control this behavior! The setting specifies the longest time (in seconds) that the alt key may be held down and still considered a tap. So, if we set this setting shorter, it'll be less likely that an alt key press/release will result in accessing the menus.

To (theoretically) disable the alt-tap functionality entirely:

1. If you don't have the Client menu up, press control-alt-shift-D.
2. Client -> Debug Settings.
3. Choose MenuAccessKeyTime
4. Set the value to 0.000

This almost completely disables alt-tap functionality. In testing, it's still possible to access the menus by brushing the alt key, but it's at least FAR less likely. I tried setting this to a negative number (on the theory that it should be impossible to hold a key down for -1 seconds), but apparently this value is clamped to 0 on the lower end.

Lex Neva for President!!!

Using the arrows I was able to get the setting to a negative number which has effectively TURNED OFF THIS DUMB FEATURE!!!

I cannot adequately express my glee. Thank you, Lex.

Woot! Lex's solution should be made into a sticky, 'cause I don't know anybody (that I've talked to) who likes that damned alt-key-opens-menus "feature".

This feature has been driving me insane since its introduction. I have been teleporting home mid conversation and activating menus all over the place since last Wednesday. Can't wait to get home and change that setting as discovered by Lex! Thank you so much.

Unfortunately, changing that setting to 0 or -1 definitely doesn't actually make the problem go away. It makes it happen less often, but I still find myself tripping over the menus. It seems that sometimes the menu system just thinks that an alt-zoom is a menu click. You can see that if you set the MenuAccessKeyTime to 1.0 and then alt-zoom something... if you press alt, click, release alt, all within a second, the menu gets focus every time. I think that's a good way of demonstrating the bug, which is that alt-zooming should NEVER be allowed to trigger the menu.

Nice find, Lex.

Looking up the debug settings using Client Debug Settings is a pain. We ought to be given a means of producting a text file with all the settings and their explanations, so that they can be searched using text search.

In the source code for the viewer there's a file called llcontroldef.cpp, which appears to have a good bit of the Client Debug Settings with their comments and possibly some other variables as well. Folks who like to fiddle with such things would do well to take a look at this file.

This is not as good as having a nicely formatted for humans file but it will do. This file with a .cpp extension is just a text file, open it in a programmer's editor like SciTE and it will even be color coded.

Just for the heck of it, really cuz I'm totally fed up with this feature, I decided to do some testing and logged one night, cleared cache and came back. I not once hit that ALT key and the menus still came down. Annoying.

As for SL and the heating issue, with the latest updates applied (the required and the optional) it no longer occurs. So maybe something screwed up during install? Anyhow, glad I have extra computers about or I'd have been one ticked off premium member. Ok, so with all these glitches I'm one anyway! LOL

But atleast I can click out of this world when it gets too frustrating.

Thanks everyone for feedback, tips, and joining in the venting over this downgrade errrrr additional feature.

Turns out that the hidden setting does not even actually work. It does prevent alt from triggering the menus when you TRY to, but I STILL get random and unwanted menu pop-ups occasionally.

The sticky alt key is a MAJOR UI disaster and MUST be removed.

This must be reported as a "bug" by everyone experiencing the problem. They ignored the warnings and the bug reports during beta, they pretty much have to listen now.

If the choice is between this and the alt+WASD keys, I'm sorry the WASD keys have to go. I've now mis-paged live help 5 times, TPed home twice, opened up an external browser somehow and turned on a feature I didn't even know was there and took 10 minutes to figure out how to turn off as well as several other exciting trips through the menu system while trying to chat.

If LL designed cockpit interfaces, there wouldn't be a plane left in the sky

Well, actually, I didn't just browse Debug Settings to find that option. I ran the client executable through a standard unix utility called "strings", and it gave me a list of all character strings it found in the file. I ran a few text searches on it, but things like "ALT" didn't bring up anything useful... until I searched for "TAP". I bet there are probably strings-like utilities for Windows.

I've had that recently too. Even had a time where I noticed it, tapped keys experimentally and watched as File (not File) would pop down when I hit "f."
Pissed me off.

Yeah, I've done that before. That's also a pain, possibly worse that using the Client Debug Settings list. For those who are interested you can get a string extractor from Microsoft at strings .

I want a command in SL to dump the debug settings list, with comments, to a text file. This stuff is useful; one should not have to root around in the dirt for it.

Was this alt whammy located in the preview version? Didnt anybody complain about it then? How the heck did this thing get through?

Yes, yes, and I dunno. Although maybe it wasn't actually in Preview... all I know is that it was in the First Look viewer, and I submitted a bug report.